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Windows: Nothing beats a full-on system backup for making sure you’ve got duplicates of all your important stuff. Free utility Back4Sure is a simple but powerful tool for quickly, incrementally backing up important files to external drives from anywhere.

Back4Sure doesn’t care if you’re backing up four or 4,000 files, it quickly organizes and ships them to the target directory of your choice. The app automatically compresses files into a Zip or 7Zip file format to save space, a great feature for saving space when you’re using a flash drive. One of its coolest features: You can set Back4Sure to work with a specific external drive (portable thumb drive or large external drive) by name, and it will remember that drive regardless of what letter it’s assigned when you plug it in. (Anyone who uses a thumb drive often knows they can often be assigned different drive letters depending on how many other devices are plugged in.) It also does incremental backups, so backups following your initial one should go relatively quickly.

It’s easy to choose which files you want Back4Sure to include in a backup—just select them from the tree-view displayed in the app’s preferences panel. Filters make it simple to include or exclude files, and the cleanup feature alerts you to orphaned files that don’t have corresponding source files anymore so you can quickly delete them.

Back4Sure logs everything it does in a plain text file, but users can opt for a second format optimized for automated analysis. You can even create a link on your desktop to a previous backup job that can be activated and re-run just by double-clicking its icon.

Back4Sure is freeware, and only works on Windows. Got a killer app you like to use for making quick and portable file backups? Let us know in the comments.

Windows only: Free audio/video conversion utility Oxelon Media Converter handles the task of batch converting music and video files to and from almost any format—and it adds a handy Explorer menu integration to make it easy.

Once you’ve installed the application and the optional plugin package, you can simply right-click on any audio or video file and choose the file format you’d like to use from the context menu, which will launch the full application where you can tweak the settings—or just click the Conversion button to begin the converting process. Since the Explorer context menu integration doesn’t work on 64-bit versions of Windows, you can also just drag and drop the files directly into the interface, and select the media format and quality you would like to use.

During our testing, Oxelon worked flawlessly for converting to and from a number of formats, and most notably is really useful for converting a folder of downloaded Flash video *.FLV files to another format. The converted video quality is excellent, and with good reason, since the whole application is just a shell for the often-used ffmpeg conversion utility.

Oxelon is a free download for Windows, but the context menu integration is 32-bit only. Readers should note that Oxelon has a surprising lack of support for generating the Matroska *.MKV format, and if you head into the Settings you should be able to disable the obnoxious launch of their newsletter page every time you close the application.

Google has announced that it has begun rolling out file storage capabilities as part of Google Docs, bringing it more in line with services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, though they’re not direct competitors just yet. The company says that regular users of Google Docs will soon be able to upload up to 1GB worth of files to the service for free, and in any file format imaginable. The idea is to allow easier file transfers between machines and enable more cloud-based collaboration between users, even with file formats that can’t be opened with Google Docs itself.

According to a post on the Official Google Blog, the feature will be coming to all Google Docs users over the next several weeks (as usual, the company is doing a gradual rollout). The maximum file size per file is 250MB, and if you want more than 1GB of total storage space, more can be purchased. Not only does this help eliminate the need to e-mail yourself files (which can be messy and confusing with multiple versions floating around), it also allows you to share those files on the Web with other users just as you would with any other Google Doc file.

Maybe Hollywood is wising up a little bit. Five out of six major film studios joined the DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem), an association of media and technology companies that are trying to make it easier to play movies you buy digitally on any device.

Now The New York Times says the DECE has agreed on a video file format that they hope will make your purchased video library work on devices other than the one you made your purchases on.

The DECE hasn’t announced the name of the format yet, but it won’t restrict who can create a device on which to play it or a store through which to sell it. It’s not DRM-free, mind you; rather, proof that you bought the file will be kept in an online “rights locker,” and any device that’s able to check the locker can play the file. The official announcement is expected this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

More Companies Are on Board

The DECE will also announce that it has 21 new members, including Cox, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and — very notably — Netflix. Many of the members will either produce devices that will play files in the new format or offer content using the format through online services. You can guess which one Netflix will likely do, of course.

There’s Still Competition

The plan isn’t quite unanimous. There’s one major studio holdout: Disney. It’s backing a competing format called KeyChest. The models aren’t identical, but they share many of the same strengths and weaknesses.

Note that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder, and rumors have been popping up that Disney (which owns television network ABC) will join the subscription TV service Apple has been trying to build behind closed doors. Apple — currently the world’s biggest provider of digital video downloads — is conspicuously absent from the DECE.

Lingering Questions

The DECE’s new plan sounds like a sure step for content placed on sale or rented, but unlimited-access services like Hulu and Netflix should make folks wonder how necessary this tech is going to be in the coming years.

The rights locker stores verification that you own the video, but what if you don’t own it but stream it with or without ads instead? The DECE hasn’t been clear about how it will handle ad-supported and subscription-based services. Since the culture of online video is currently trending this direction, some assurance of relevance would be welcome.

Consumers also expect to be able to enjoy their content without authentication hassles or online connectivity. If you take the file to your friend’s house to watch on her TV, will that TV need a network connection to check the rights locker? Probably so.

Do you think the DECE’s new format will make consumers happier with their online video options? Let us know in the comments.

[img credit: lowjumpingfrog]

Tags: CES, DECE, video

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve seen a new entrant in MyRacer’s lisse line of portable media players, but the H10 looks to be changing all that with its 16GB of internal storage space and expansive display. You’ll notice a familiar design here externally, and within you’ll find a 5-inch panel (1,280 x 720 resolution), an HDMI output, FM tuner / transmitter, a microSD expansion slot, voice recorder and support for just about any file format known to man. Mum’s the word on a price and release date, but we doubt it’ll be long before it’s roaming the streets of Seoul.

MyRacer serves up 5-inch Lisse H10 portable media player originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Safa Xing LED features MP3 playback, 27 pixel resolution

Filed under: Portable Audio

Safa Xing LED features MP3 playback, 27 pixel resolution originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Tips and tricks, iWork

Former TUAW colleague David Chartier over at Finer Things in Mac has noted something interesting about the innocuous iWork ‘09 file format. What he found may surprise you.

An iWork ‘09 file created from Pages, Numbers, or Keynote actually lives a secret life as a ZIP archive. This trick isn’t a new one; the most common example of archive trickery by Apple is probably the iPod/iPhone software bundle which uses ZIP as a container format. Previous iWork versions actually created folder-like bundle files by default, which made them tricky to upload to cloud storage or email to collaborators.

In the case of the new iWork files, changing the file extension to .zip and expanding the archive reveals the as-expected XML document and plist files (for the document and its formatting) as well as a little PDF surprise — a preview version of the file. What this means for you is that you can send an iWork file to a friend or co-worker and regardless of their operating system choice or installed software base, they can “view” your document by unzipping it and opening the PDF.

On Windows, you would simply change the extension to .zip and open with your favorite un-archiving utility. Given the kludgy-ness of this process, it doesn’t surprise me that Apple isn’t promoting it. However, it would be interesting to see the folks in Cupertino release an iWork viewer for the Windows users in our lives (other than the extant iwork.com sharing service).

[Via Download Squad]

TUAWiWork secret life as ZIP file revealed, includes PDF preview originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looking for a geotagging solution that doesn’t discriminate based on what kind of camera you have? Looking for one that can fit snugly into your Fifth Pocket? The PhotoTrackr Mini looks to be that very device, boasting a diminutive thumb drive-esque appearance and the same geotagging technology as found in the original. Put simply, the device works by syncing the time of your camera with bundled software; when you’re back from a shoot (a shoot where your device also was), you just allow the application to figure out where a given shot was snapped at what time. There’s also Mac and RAW file format support on this model, neither of which were compatible with the prior version. Pre-orders are being accepted now at $69, and the first shipments are expected to go out next month.

Continue reading PhotoTrackr Mini geotagging device shrinks down, adds Mac and RAW support

Filed under: Digital Cameras, GPS

PhotoTrackr Mini geotagging device shrinks down, adds Mac and RAW support originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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